i was going to read your well-moderated post, but then you used bbcode, and i realized it was fundamentally impossible for you to have anything worthwhile to say.
fleming's books were (loosely) based off his own experience in british intelligence. M was based on a real MI6 head, who often initialed papers using only his last initial, "C".
so presumably the OP meant that like M, Q had a real antecedent.
actually you can get 80-proof soju, or at least shochu, the japanese version. it's not half bad if you go in with no expectations. (it's a bit odd by western standards--the taste is a bit like sake, though not usually as strong.)
now there's an idea--nuclear-powered chunnel machine. we could start with the gibraltar-morocco tunnel and work our way up to the london-sydney gravity train.
i believe a common comparison is that you'd get less radiation from sharing your bed with an equivalent mass of u238 than you do from your s.o.--people are full of c14 and k40. (plus u238 probably makes great cosmic ray shielding)
a fair and consistent position. just remember that the mobs of europe have proven themselves at least as barbaric as those of america, time and time again. (this is more addressed to the AC GP of your post than to you.)
deliberately making him suffer, when we're killing him anyway, is where i draw the "then we're no better" line. i can, just barely, see a possible rationale for deliberate infliction of pain as a standalone punishment, but the point would be to deliver a lasting lesson to the person involved, not to the world at large. torture followed by execution is too pointless to be justifiable.
justice happens when the guilty are punished and the innocent aren't. process is incidental--it's just there to increase the odds that law will produce justice.
consider the fates of the great butchers of the twentieth century:
hitler: justice served
mussolini: justice served
tojo: justice served
lenin: no justice[1]
stalin: no justice[1]
mao: no justice
pol pot: eh, call it 33%--he died powerless and in exile, but managed to live out his alloted years
ceausescu: justice served
milosevic: call it 50%--he went to jail, but quite literally died of old age while the u.n. stood around with their collective thumb up their ass
it is, in the ultimate scheme of things, completely irrelevant that hitler died by his own hand, mussolini and ceausescu were executed by obvious kangaroo courts, and tojo got "victors' justice"--they all got what they deserved. you can presumably guess at this point what i think of saddam's fate.
of course, the really funny thing is that of all those i listed (and more), saddam got the closest thing modern history has to offer to a procedurally-perfect trial of an ex-dictator--most trials of deposed leaders, nuremberg and its asian equivalent included, count ex-post-facto laws and jurisdictional shenanigans among their least irregularities, frequently not bothering with laws at all. at least saddam had a trial conducted by his own people and was convicted of violating a real law that had been in place at the time.
1: unless you believe the rumors/conspiracy theories that each was killed by his successor, in which case call it 25% justice under "live by the sword, die by the sword"
concur. i settled some years ago on a position of "support in principle, but can't trust our system with its finality" re: the death penalty.
and fwiw, there are plenty of prisons out there that would be better living than almost anywhere in iraq--check out where the piratebay people go if they're convicted.
it's said that the french revolutionaries would hold the head of the vic up facing the body in the hopes that it could still see what was going on. perhaps there's a little truth in that after all....
awkward for the spectators, but still beats the hell out of the "fire in your veins but too paralyzed to scream" that seems to be the best guess of what happens in a botched lethal injection.
how about L1? how big would something have to be at that range to block a useful amount of light? (yes, it's unstable, but it'd be trivial to use some of the light for power for station-keeping)
hanging is a perfectly reasonable form of execution. it's probably easier to get right than lethal injection or electrocution, given some of the horror stories we've all heard. if the rope is long enough and positioned properly, death is instantaneous from a broken neck.
actually there was an article last year about some researchers who taught chimps to use money (plastic "task reward" tokens exchangeable for food). they promptly invented prostitution.
Furthermore. The assemblage of "Fantasy" as we know it today has pretty much one primary source and one derivative source: Tolkien -> DnD.
well, it's a bit much to say it's all down to tolkien. he certainly shaped the genre, but ignoring people like george macdonald or lord dunsany would be like saying science fiction started with asimov (thus forgetting wells and verne).
and there's plenty of people out there writing reasonably well-researched fantasy based on actual western traditions--i read the first book of lawhead's song of albion recently, and it was derived directly from irish mythology.
(hmm... Firefox says that "verifiably" isn't a word, but I looked it up, turns out it's a valid adverb form of "verifiable")
firefox's dictionary is horrible. i've lost track of the number of technical terms and simple grammatical derivations it's missing. the os x dictionary is far better, but i'm stuck on windows here at work....
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code pink used to protest under signs reading "lick bush and dick"
You spin me right round, baby, right round, in a manner depriving me of an inertial reference frame. Baby.
[i]first diagnosed[/i]
i was going to read your well-moderated post, but then you used bbcode, and i realized it was fundamentally impossible for you to have anything worthwhile to say.
isn't that basically what nietzsche meant by "slave morality"?
Ain't that the truth.
fleming's books were (loosely) based off his own experience in british intelligence. M was based on a real MI6 head, who often initialed papers using only his last initial, "C". so presumably the OP meant that like M, Q had a real antecedent.
actually you can get 80-proof soju, or at least shochu, the japanese version. it's not half bad if you go in with no expectations. (it's a bit odd by western standards--the taste is a bit like sake, though not usually as strong.)
this is terrifyingly plausible
now there's an idea--nuclear-powered chunnel machine. we could start with the gibraltar-morocco tunnel and work our way up to the london-sydney gravity train.
i believe a common comparison is that you'd get less radiation from sharing your bed with an equivalent mass of u238 than you do from your s.o.--people are full of c14 and k40. (plus u238 probably makes great cosmic ray shielding)
a fair and consistent position. just remember that the mobs of europe have proven themselves at least as barbaric as those of america, time and time again. (this is more addressed to the AC GP of your post than to you.)
deliberately making him suffer, when we're killing him anyway, is where i draw the "then we're no better" line. i can, just barely, see a possible rationale for deliberate infliction of pain as a standalone punishment, but the point would be to deliver a lasting lesson to the person involved, not to the world at large. torture followed by execution is too pointless to be justifiable.
justice happens when the guilty are punished and the innocent aren't. process is incidental--it's just there to increase the odds that law will produce justice.
consider the fates of the great butchers of the twentieth century:
it is, in the ultimate scheme of things, completely irrelevant that hitler died by his own hand, mussolini and ceausescu were executed by obvious kangaroo courts, and tojo got "victors' justice"--they all got what they deserved. you can presumably guess at this point what i think of saddam's fate.
of course, the really funny thing is that of all those i listed (and more), saddam got the closest thing modern history has to offer to a procedurally-perfect trial of an ex-dictator--most trials of deposed leaders, nuremberg and its asian equivalent included, count ex-post-facto laws and jurisdictional shenanigans among their least irregularities, frequently not bothering with laws at all. at least saddam had a trial conducted by his own people and was convicted of violating a real law that had been in place at the time.
1: unless you believe the rumors/conspiracy theories that each was killed by his successor, in which case call it 25% justice under "live by the sword, die by the sword"
concur. i settled some years ago on a position of "support in principle, but can't trust our system with its finality" re: the death penalty. and fwiw, there are plenty of prisons out there that would be better living than almost anywhere in iraq--check out where the piratebay people go if they're convicted.
check the european polling numbers on the death penalty sometime. afaik, the ban's been completely imposed from above.
it's said that the french revolutionaries would hold the head of the vic up facing the body in the hopes that it could still see what was going on. perhaps there's a little truth in that after all....
awkward for the spectators, but still beats the hell out of the "fire in your veins but too paralyzed to scream" that seems to be the best guess of what happens in a botched lethal injection.
how about L1? how big would something have to be at that range to block a useful amount of light? (yes, it's unstable, but it'd be trivial to use some of the light for power for station-keeping)
hanging is a perfectly reasonable form of execution. it's probably easier to get right than lethal injection or electrocution, given some of the horror stories we've all heard. if the rope is long enough and positioned properly, death is instantaneous from a broken neck.
actually there was an article last year about some researchers who taught chimps to use money (plastic "task reward" tokens exchangeable for food). they promptly invented prostitution.
"Laser Wolf?!? You're a fegala?"
"I'm a lonely man, Tevye!"
Furthermore. The assemblage of "Fantasy" as we know it today has pretty much one primary source and one derivative source: Tolkien -> DnD.
well, it's a bit much to say it's all down to tolkien. he certainly shaped the genre, but ignoring people like george macdonald or lord dunsany would be like saying science fiction started with asimov (thus forgetting wells and verne). and there's plenty of people out there writing reasonably well-researched fantasy based on actual western traditions--i read the first book of lawhead's song of albion recently, and it was derived directly from irish mythology.
shush, you--he has enough Trouble learning not to capitalize every Noun as it is
(hmm... Firefox says that "verifiably" isn't a word, but I looked it up, turns out it's a valid adverb form of "verifiable")
firefox's dictionary is horrible. i've lost track of the number of technical terms and simple grammatical derivations it's missing. the os x dictionary is far better, but i'm stuck on windows here at work....
you are ashton kutcher and i claim my five pounds